Inside the magazine, Penelope discusses her first audition, her cinematic soulmate Pedro Almodovar, her first meeting with Woody Allen and the key to doing comedy.

Pick up the issue when it hits newsstands on August 21 or head to WMagazine.com.

On whether it was complicated for her and co-star Javier Bardem to speak Spanish in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, when director Woody Allen didn’t speak the language: “He gave us the script he wrote in English, and he gave us the freedom to translate and improvise. Woody told me recently that he still doesn’t know if we are talking about the atomic bomb. And it’s the same thing in To Rome With Love—he doesn’t speak Italian. I translated my lines. So he still doesn’t know what I am saying.”

On her initial meeting with Woody Allen: “[It was] fast. Very fast. We sat down for 30 seconds. He had seen Volver, and he thought I would be right for this character. And that was it. I never spoke to him again until we were shooting.”

On whether she read the script before saying yes: “No. I had no idea who I would be playing. After I said yes, he [Allen] sent the script with this man who knocked on my door and said, “I will come back and pick it up in an hour.” I had to read really fast, and it was in English. It was the same thing with To Rome With Love—a different man but the same behavior. This time, I asked for two hours [laughs]. People ask Woody, “Do you spend a lot of time with your actors?” In front of all of us he says, “No—I try to avoid the cast. They come to me with all these strange questions that I either don’t know how to answer or I don’t want to answer.”

On her scene in Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces where she thinks your husband has died during sex: “I love that scene: It’s hard to invent a new way to shoot a sex scene, but Pedro has done it so many times. During the shooting, Pedro was giving my character thoughts. She’s kind of happy that her husband’s dead, but Pedro kept saying to me: “What are you going to do with the body? Why are you putting on lipstick?” The whole crew was laughing so hard, but a man had just died. That tension between tragedy and hilarity is why Pedro is a genius.”